Extortion Is Such an Ugly Word

Don't you hate it when people with extreme opinions are allowed to express them, especially in front of impressionable college students? That unfortunate occurrence almost took place in California where, fortunately, level heads soon prevailed.

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Author and agribusiness critic Michael Pollan was invited to give a lecture to the public at California Polytechnic University - San Luis Obispo, today as it happens. Organized by the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Science's Sustainable Agriculture Resource Consortium, the event included a fundraiser for the SARC, which took place Wednesday. Pollan, if you're not familiar with his work, has been a vocal and prolific critic of large-scale agricultural practices, which has done little to endear him to large-scale agriculturalists, and has written several books on the matter, including Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.

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Rightly alarmed that someone so intent upon destroying the very system that feeds hungry people around the world had been invited to openly criticize that system at one of California's top agricultural schools, Cal-Poly alumnus and chairman of Harris Ranch Beef Co., David Wood, sent a letter to the school's president, Warren Baker, reminding the absent-minded college official of his half-million dollar pledge toward a new meat processing facility for the school. Baker, fortunately, is a reasonable man and saw his mistake: within a week, he had changed the format of Pollan's presentation to that of a panel, to include vice president of organic sales for Earthbound Farm Organic, Tonya Antle, and meat science expert Gary Smith from Colorado State University. Whew! Students who, in many cases, were raised with our current agricultural practices and who are being trained to utilize them, were spared the threat of having to hear another opinion completely unmitigated by other voices.

Neither Pollan nor Wood were available for comment, although reports in both the Los Angeles Times and Capital Press, a leading agricultural newspaper, noted that Pollan has been quite critical of Harris Ranch in the past, referring to it as the "epitome of unsustainability." Purely a coincidence, I'm sure. To suggest any other intent would be to infer that Harris's letter to the Cal-Poly president was the equivalent of extortion.

So, breathe easy, dear readers. The free flow of ideas and open, rigorous debate about the nature of food production in the United States has been preserved, now in an easier-to-digest format.